Fluxus

A critical discussion of positive and negative aspects of work and play in transcending
the boredom of contemporary capitalist culture. Applying the theory of the Situationist
International, with particular focus on Raoul Vaneigem’s ‘The Revolution of Everyday
Life’ with a close reading of Hannah Arendt’s ‘The Human Condition’ and illustrating
those ideas with post-revolution Soviet art from 1900 to 1940’s and performance work
from the 1960’s Fluxus group. The argument develops from an illustration of Arendt’s
distinction between labour and work to attempt to provide new definitions of play and the
problems that arise when these actions and processes are documented. The essay
concludes with a discussion of productive play and what essential aspects of work and
labour can be employed to develop a new, more satisfying daily existence.

Educators practice performance pedagogy as the method where an educator/facilitator is seen as a performer or actor (Pineau 1994, p. 4). This paper presents an analysis of the historical roots of performance pedagogies in Fluxus pedagogies and performance pedagogy practices within participatory art events in Lithuania as exemplified by festivals AN88 (1988) and AN89 (1989). The case of my research rests on the contemporary implementation of performance pedagogy techniques during the course The Temporary Department of Time, Space, and Action for BA students at the Vilnius Academy of Arts in Lithuania. This research aims to define the concept theories within performance pedagogy in the art academy education, which developed behind the terms Human Semiotics (Ander-sen 2002), Hyper Performer, 1 and InterMedia (Higgins 1984). This project was implemented using the strategy of critical utopian action research in the context of the Vilnius Academy of Arts. The empirical material was gathered during my employment as a guest lecturer and the implementation of my pedagogical internship at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. 2 These concept theories are defined through. a reflexive analysis of archive material on the historical origin of performance pedagogies, originating in Fluxus pedagogies, local Lithuanian participatory art, and data from the contemporary case of my project The Temporary Department of Time, Space and Action (2018), in the form of archive material, photographs, interviews, observations, notes, and my diary. The results of this research are the application of performance pedagogy concepts and terminology to the art and education projects and the definition of the key concept theories within this field. These results can be useful for artists and those practicing university pedagogy.

Fostering conservation as a discursive and contextual practice, this essay examines transitional media that necessitate new ways of thinking about continuity. It looks at two examples of artworks with the objective of unraveling the varying modes of their transition. An event score, event-performance, object, and film drawn from the artistic legacies of George Brecht and Nam June Paik illustrate that ideas of permanence and impermanence are linked with an understanding of artworks in time and duration. While conservation reveals itself as an intervention in the temporal dimension of artworks, the theories of duration allow us to better understand the reciprocal relations between materials and meanings. In doing so, these theories acknowledge and attempt to make sense of the performative materiality of these works.

Since 1960s, artistic narrative began to occur in an intermediated manner and under the scrutiny of a critical episteme. The pictorial representation has been discarded and the artwork process began to juxtapose up various media and subjects. Galleries began to refuse the specific and filled their spaces with mixtures of video and embodied installations, which lead to a language called  “performance-for-the-monitor”, mostly  recognizable in a ‘gendered’ mediated artistic iconography...

Creative writing, creative projects, and projects involving creativity incorporate high personal investment from students. The work generated from this input can be used as a “springboard” to deepen general learning. When conducted in English Medium Instruction classes (EMI), or in classes with related forms of teaching, the learning of English as an Additional Language (EAL) can be enhanced as a by-product (as implied by Allwright, 2013, p.6). As part of an EMI course designed by the author, second-year undergraduate comparative culture majors at a Japanese university explored aspects of creativity by researching elements of twentieth century art movements, including writing methods. From these literary guidelines students produced their own creative work, which ultimately appeared as part of a whole-class poster presentation. Among other features, students focused on the history and certain literary personalities of the movements as part of their research. The main interests of this article are learner autonomy, agency and growth generated a) from using this creative student-produced work, and b) from engagement with the research and creative material. It shares details of class activities and evaluations from the yearlong course, including examples of student literature. Learner rather than language development holds the stronger focus of the paper. However, as the lessons were conducted in a foreign language (English), aspects of language development are touched upon.

This is Chapter Three of Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York. It charts Kusama's early career from Japan to her development in New York.

The 1960s was a time of incredible freedom and exploration in the art world, particularly in New York City, which witnessed the explosion of New Music, Happenings, Fluxus, New Dance, pop art, and minimalist art. Also notable during this period, although often overlooked, is the inordinate amount of revolutionary art that was created by women.

Into Performance fills a critical gap in both American and Japanese art history as it brings to light the historical significance of five women artists-Yoko Ono, Yayoi Kusama, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi, and Shigeko Kubota. Unusually courageous and self-determined, they were among the first Japanese women to leave their country-and its male-dominated, conservative art world-to explore the artistic possibilities in New York. They not only benefited from the New York art scene, however, they played a major role in the development of international performance and intermedia art by bridging avant garde movements in Tokyo and New York.

This book traces the pioneering work of these five women artists and the socio-cultural issues that shaped their careers. Into Performance also explores the transformation of these artists' lifestyle from traditionally confined Japanese women to internationally active artists. Yoshimoto demonstrates how their work paved the way for younger Japanese women artists who continue to seek opportunities in the West today.

Becoming commercially available in the mid 1960s, video quickly became integral to the intense experimentalism of New York City's music and art scenes. The medium was able to record image and sound at the same time, which allowed composers to visualize their music and artists to sound their images. But as well as creating unprecedented forms of audiovisuality, video work also producedinteractive spaces that questioned conventional habits of music and art consumption. This book explores the first decade of creative video work, focusing on the ways in which video technology was used to dissolve the boundaries between art and music.

The democratizing movements of small press and artists book publishing attained political consciousness and blossomed alongside and in direct proportion to-the social and cultural upheavals of the 196Os and early 197Os. What is surprising is that they are rarely talked about in the space of the same paragraph or the same page or even the same book in most print culture histories. Dick Higgins' the Something Else Press (1964-1974) questioned the very distinction between between literary small press publications and artists books, even before the latter term was formulated. Higgins' refusal to dis-entwine literature from art, both in his own work and within the context of SEP (and later) publishing projects, is in line with his conceptualization of intermedia, and his experiments with the book form as a way to disturb divisions between the arts. This paper explores the material history of SEP publishing practices and Higgins' connections with the small press community (and COSMEP in particular) to offer correctives to established narratives of SEP within the history of artists book publishing.

Although the cellist Charlotte Moorman was most famed for her topless performances of Nam June Paik’s _Opera Sextronique_ and subsequent arrest for indecent exposure, she spent her entire career grappling with John Cage’s _26’ 1.1499’’ for a String Player_. Yet, as Benjamin Piekut has demonstrated in _Experimentalism Otherwise_, Cage was unhappy with her interpretation of the piece. This particular score allows significant freedom in terms of sound production, though the temporality in which it occurs is strictly defined. Especially in collaboration with Nam June Paik, Moorman increasingly exceeded the confines of the notation and shifted her focus to the section of the score calling for “sounds other than those produced on the strings.” She maintained a serious and earnest dedication to Cage’s original score, though Moorman’s personal markings eventually supplanted the composer’s as her performances with Paik became more extravagant and spectacular.
Building on Piekut’s study, this paper draws from archival material in the Charlotte Moorman Collection and the John Cage Correspondence at Northwestern University to interpret her personal, annotated score for _26’ 1.1499”_. Cage’s unconventional notation requires collaboration from the performer, who must complete his compositional process in order to make the work performable. The piece became a catalyst for Moorman to explore and embrace her agency as an artist. A close reading of Moorman’s annotations illuminates her artistic and interpretive approach and serves as an archive of its performance history. _26’1.1499’’_ became a vehicle for Moorman to find her artistic voice and to embark on a remarkable career in avant-garde performance. She injected a visually and acoustically embodied version of herself into this artifact that Cage produced. A lifelong devotee of Cage’s music and philosophy, Moorman took full advantage of the intrinsic freedom of the score, even when it surpassed the boundaries envisioned by the composer.

Der Aufsatz beleuchtet das Phänomen der Instrumentenzerstörung unter drei Aspekten: Destruktion wird erstens als Wendung gegen die Insignien bürgerlicher Kultur, zweitens als genuin theatraler Akt sowie drittens als Möglichkeit zur Schaffung von Artefakten oder Klangspuren betrachtet.

The 1960s was a time of incredible freedom and exploration in the art world, particularly in New York City, which witnessed the explosion of New Music, Happenings, Fluxus, New Dance, pop art, and minimalist art. Also notable during this period, although often overlooked, is the inordinate amount of revolutionary art that was created by women.

Into Performance fills a critical gap in both American and Japanese art history as it brings to light the historical significance of five women artists-Yoko Ono, Yayoi Kusama, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi, and Shigeko Kubota. Unusually courageous and self-determined, they were among the first Japanese women to leave their country-and its male-dominated, conservative art world-to explore the artistic possibilities in New York. They not only benefited from the New York art scene, however, they played a major role in the development of international performance and intermedia art by bridging avant garde movements in Tokyo and New York.

This book traces the pioneering work of these five women artists and the socio-cultural issues that shaped their careers. Into Performance also explores the transformation of these artists' lifestyle from traditionally confined Japanese women to internationally active artists. Yoshimoto demonstrates how their work paved the way for younger Japanese women artists who continue to seek opportunities in the West today.

The contemporary use of the turntable as a sound creation device makes it a quintessential post-modern musical instrument, and the destruction of the technology has allowed artists to explore concepts ranging from it historical socioeconomic value to the exploitation of its current representation as a virtuosic musical instrument in hip-hop and DJ culture.

The street figures as a primary location for Ben Vautier’s early performances in 1960s Nice. This essay focuses on the potential slippages explored by Ben between the artist and the ‘man in the street’, whose fundamental anonymity was hailed as a paradigmatic feature of the everyday by Maurice Blanchot in 1962. Such theories of the everyday by Blanchot, and by Henri Lefebvre before him, shed new light on Ben’s original experiments in redefining both his role as an artist and the material status of his artworks. Furthermore, theories of the quotidien provide a useful framework for a comparative study of Ben’s practice and other perspectives on the everyday developed by a number of his contemporaries affiliated to three different artist groups who were also active on the Côte d’Azur at the time: Nouveau Réalisme, Fluxus and Supports/Surfaces. In this way, debates concerning the everyday are shown to have touched upon central issues of consumption, leisure and revolution that significantly shaped French art and thought in the 1960s.

John Cages theories on simultaneity, chance operations and indeterminacy influenced the artists of the Fluxus group. The articles features different concepts of Cages notations and the event cards of Fluxus artists. The relations between performances and videos especially in works by Nam June Paik and Joseph Beuys are discussed. The relevance of Cage´s concept and artistic practice for these uses of new media is explained.
In: URL: http://dreher.netzliteratur.net/2_Cage.pdf

In the US context Fluxus is understood as an advance of the '60s radicalism. The assumption that Fluxus was opposed to consumption culture, as that embodied by Pop art, is among the interpretations that renew such a view. Examining the example of Implosions Inc., a short-lived but nevertheless interesting commercial enterprise formed by Robert Watts, Herman Fine and George Maciunas in 1967, this essay focuses its attention on the complex relationship between Fluxus and commercial culture. Implosions Inc. was a project in which many Pop artists were asked to participate along with its Fluxus founders, and it was intended as another step forward in the transformation of the artist into a commodity mass-producer. In analyzing this phenomenon, this article questions assumed principles in the Neo-avantgarde theory like the distinction between art production and culture consumption. The essay, however, will try to establish another paradigm that draws the differences between Pop art and Fluxus as the kind of audiences both these tendencies tried to conform. As a conclusion, the article fleshes out some ideas on individualism that were developed by Maciunas, which shed light on the notions surrounding the idea of collectiv-ism as developed in Fluxus.

From the mid-twentieth century into the twenty-first, artists and musicians manipulated, cracked, and broke audio media technologies to produce novel sounds and performances. Artists and musicians, including John Cage, Nam June Paik, Yasunao Tone, and Oval, pulled apart both playback devices (phonographs and compact disc players) and the recorded media (vinyl records and compact discs) to create an extended sound palette. In Cracked Media, Caleb Kelly explores how the deliberate utilization of the normally undesirable (a crack, a break) has become the site of productive creation. Cracked media, Kelly writes, slides across disciplines, through music, sound, and noise. Cracked media encompasses everything from Cage's silences and indeterminacies, to Paik's often humorous tape works, to the cold and clean sounds of digital glitch in the work of Tone and Oval. Kelly offers a detailed historical account of these practices, arguing that they can be read as precursors to contemporary new media.

Kelly looks at the nature of recording technology and the music industry in relation to the crack and the break, and discusses the various manifestations of noise, concluding that neither theories of recording nor theories of noise offer an adequate framework for understanding cracked media. Connecting the historical avant-garde to modern-day turntablism, and predigital destructive techniques to the digital ticks, pops, and clicks of the glitch, Kelly proposes new media theorizations of cracked media that focus on materiality and the everyday.

This essay recommends a revised framework for approaching periodicals by putting the Bay Area Dadaists’ 1970s “Dadazines” into
dialogue with San Francisco punk zines, and by linking these periodicals
with each group’s performances. For these artists and for punks, zines offered a shared, cheap, quick means of expression and communication. Their zines also show that periodicals have the potential to be dynamic sites, like performances, that foster cross-fertilization and interaction and productively hold in tension materiality and ephemerality, mediation and liveness. Indeed, we can understand them as performances in their own right.

This essay argues that key aspects of Fluxus have a striking resemblance to the ideas and antics of the computer “hackers” who, in the sixties and seventies, defined the culture of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence lab. The past several decades have seen the rise of a rich body of scholarship on hackers and the cultural critique that their practices imply. By relating this “hacker ethic” to the works of the Fluxus artists (who likewise practiced in the sixties and seventies), this essay argues that Fluxus deserves to be understood not as a late manifestation of dada or the inchoate prefiguration of conceptual art and institutional critique, but rather as the first avant-garde movement fit to the age of electronic information and their network protocols.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modernism-modernity/v022/22.4.rothman.html

激浪派並不是一種藝術 流派，它沒有文本，精確地說， 它更接近於一種表達方式和生存 態度，許多躍入其中的參與人， 各自詮釋激浪派而發展獨特的演 繹形式，於是其面貌始終模糊， 形體變化不定，然而可以綜括的 是：它總是幽默、輕薄、偶發， 卻僅只是想像的共同體。從宣言 迄今，走過半世紀的激浪派，其 肉身已經從1960年代的少年邁入 中老年。過往以無敘事、隨機的 行為拼貼，做為對秩序化、正典 化的藝術史之抵抗，如今卻成為 一場詛咒：拒絕被收編於歷史的 藝術家們，一位接一位地被收藏 家著書、付梓；而他們自豪的 「虛無戲法」，也成了影響後現代 藝術最壯闊的一場革命，激浪派 終究被自己開了最大的玩笑。

Ever since Marcel Duchamp devised his 'readymades' in the early twentieth century, the majority of the critical literature on artworks that comprise readymade and found objects focuses on the commodity status of these items and the critique of consumer culture. This session, instead, invites papers that explore the links between found object-based sculpture and its relationship to the economies and technologies of production in industrial and postindustrial metropolitan areas-as Anne Wagner has argued, the history of sculpture is in constant dialogue with the history of technologies of production. From the dominance of industrial zones in early twentieth-century modern cities around the world to the waning of industry, the emergence of service-based economies and the growth of the financial sectors in postindustrial, postmodern urban areas, this panel explores how artistic practices that incorporate found objects negotiate the shifting texture of cities on the level of the street, the neighborhood, the workplace, the local store, real estate and urban life. This panel encourages the participation of art historians, curators, museum professionals, artists and theorists whose work and scholarship encompass the study of readymades, found objects, and simulated everyday objects in modern and contemporary sculpture and explore its links to obsolete and emerging technologies and sites of production in the context of industrial and postindustrial cities worldwide.

* Please send proposals for a paper including title, abstract (250 words maximum) and a short bio to Dr Natasha Adamou at adamou.natasha@gmail.com

For more information concerning the conference, see: http://www.collegeart.org/programs/conference/

Order through the press at 20% off with code UCPNEW at checkout: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo46107003.html

“PURGE the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art. . . . Promote living art, anti-art, promote NON ART REALITY to be grasped by all peoples,” writes artist George Maciunas in his Fluxus manifesto of 1963. Reacting against an elitist art world enthralled by modernist aesthetics, Fluxus encouraged playfulness, chance, irreverence, and viewer participation. The diverse collective—including George Brecht, Robert Filliou, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi, Ben Vautier, and Robert Watts—embraced humble objects and everyday gestures as critical means of finding freedom and excitement beyond traditional forms of art-making.

While today the Fluxus collective is recognized for its radical neo-avant-garde works of performance, publishing, and relational art and its experimental, interdisciplinary approach, it was not taken seriously in its own time. With Fluxus Forms, Natilee Harren captures the magnetic energy of Fluxus activities and collaborations that emerged at the intersections of art, music, performance, and literature. The book offers insight into the nature of art in the 1960s as it traces the international development of the collective’s unique intermedia works—including event scores and Fluxbox multiples—that irreversibly expanded the boundaries of contemporary art.

CONTENTS

Prelude: The Artwork in Flux

1: Diagramming Form, from Graphic Notation to the Fluxus Event Score

2: Of Drips, Diagrams, and Immanent Form: Fluxus in the Wake of Abstract Expressionist Painting

3: George Brecht and the Notational Object

4: George Maciunas, Fluxboxes, and the Transitional Commodity

5: Objects Without Object: Robert Filliou and the Unworking of Fluxus

Coda: The Fluxus Virtual, Actually

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

REVIEW QUOTES

Michael Pisaro, California Institute of the Arts
“With this deeply researched and engagingly written book, Harren gracefully erases boundaries between art history and musicology. In the discussion of George Brecht and the event score, she reveals the ambiguous double power of the score: as both action and potential. Over the course of the book she slows down the explosive event of Fluxus just enough to draw the personal and conceptual chain reactions that made the movement into a turning point in twentieth-century art, but she does not lose its FLUX.”

Judith Rodenbeck, author of Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings
"What a terrific book! Fluxus Forms is beautifully written, lovingly detailed, intelligent, groundbreaking, and will be a field-defining text for many years. Nuanced and muscular in both argument and prosody, the book presents a long overdue formal and critical analysis of Fluxus. It is Harren’s insistence on the variabilities, the very fluxiness, of the virtual and its attentive materializations in the actual that is at the heart of this historical account. Showing an intimate knowledge of the material, her exegesis of the diagrammatic aspect of Fluxus complicates and deepens the urgency of this work today. The enormous value of this project is its eschewal of a general theory in favor of a working theory—a brilliant diagramming, in fact—of something that ‘refuses to work.’”

Hannah Higgins, author of Fluxus Experience
“Fluxus Forms offers an original perspective by focusing on the diagram and the musical score as key components of Fluxus. In shaping her discussion of Fluxus around the idea of ‘artworks in flux,’ Harren opens up connection between the abstract and the concrete. Using Andreas Huyssen’s idea that Fluxus is the ‘master code of postmodernism,’ she presents the movement with fresh eyes and reveals how the collective’s multisensory engagement with the debris of capitalist production—found in the form of Fluxus boxes as well as the notational objects that link things and events—functions as instructional signposts for a newly imagined postindustrial politics that avoid commoditization of the art spectacle.”

Michael Gallope, author of Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable
“Fluxus took inspiration from music, but not because of its abstract forms or its affective power. Rather, these artists saw potential in music’s philosophically powerful technology: the score. Experimental scores enabled Fluxus to provoke audiences with endlessly novel and open-ended linkages between concepts, materials, and forms. Harren’s tour-de-force narrative dramatically reframes the way we understand the cross-fertilization of the postwar avant-garde.”

Jeffrey Weiss, curator and critic
“From Byzantine studies to theories of representation in the digital age, a wave of historical and critical thinking is now devoted to questions surrounding the identity of the artwork and the status of the object. Harren’s remarkable book is a deep dive into the intermedial history of Fluxus from that vantage. Grounded in an intensive examination of means, her account brings new clarity to the terms of a practice that, long elusive, emerges in her hands as utterly indispensable to a historical and conceptual investigation of the ontology of art.”

The Arts Fuse
"Grade this book A+."

Art Libraries Society of North America
"Richly researched and academically grounded, Harren fluidly weaves together the stories of artists and events key to the evolution of Fluxus... an outstanding addition to the literature on Fluxus that offers new context and fresh insight on the foundations of art performance and object-based practices."

This paper explores how the concept of Absolute Nothingness as developed in the thought of three key Kyoto School thinkers Nishida Kitarō, Tanabe Hajime and Nishitani Keiji has influenced the practice of sound art. The paper examines the influence of these three philosophers on D.T. Suzuki and John Cage, the Mono-ha movement, and the Fluxus movement before examining how these influences have shaped sound art practice.

A lo largo del tiempo la noción de juego ha mutado modificando nuestros hábitos cotidianos, generando nuevas formas de relacionarnos e invadiendo otros ámbitos de carácter social, educativo y científico. Ya en 1938 el historiador Johan Huizinga analizaba en Homo Ludens  la influencia del juego como fenómeno cultural, intentando demostrar la insuficiencia de concepciones convencionales como “homo sapiens” y “homo faber”. Sus teorías quedan ahora superadas por el empuje de unas nuevas tecnologías que han conseguido forzar estos cambios de forma exponencial.
El videojuego, en concreto, ha sobrepasado su “territorio natural” expandiéndose a otros espacios más físicos -que requieren la movilización de facto del jugador- y más conceptuales, donde se abordan temas políticos y sociales como la biotecnología, la emigración, el abuso empresarial o la religión. El videojuego ya no es sólo ocio popular y baja cultura, sino aprendizaje, herramienta de concienciación,…e incluso arte.